“Ky, you can tell me,” Becka’s tone was gentle. The tone you took with a scared animal or the mortally wounded.
“No,” I said again. “I can’t. I can’t tell you in the same way I can’t…” My chest tightened.
Breathe, just breathe.
“I can’t say his n-name. And I need you to not ask if I’m ‘okay’.”
Becka frowned and opened her mouth, but I cut her off.
“Because if you ask me that, I don’t think I can lie, so I need you to just… not. Can you do that?”
She closed her mouth and nodded.
“We’re not… it’s not.” My shoulders heaved under the weight of a suppressed sob. I pushed it down. Took a breath. Exhaled. Did it again. And then I pulled my shoulders back.
“We’re done.”
Becka sniffled, her mouth turning down, but I saw the way she bit her lip, and I was grateful she was trying.
Silence fell, neither of us knowing what to say, and the weight of it pressed against me.
I hadn’t realised until too late what having this conversation would mean. That telling Becka would make it a thing that had happened.
Would make it real.
Breath pushed itself through the lump in my throat, too fast. I squeezed my eyes closed as my mind raced to think of something – anything – that wasn’t this. Wasn’t him.
“I’m so sorry, babes,” Becka said in a strained voice, providing the distraction I needed.
I forced my eyes open to look at her. To really see her. She was so disproportionately upset about a situation not her own,I thought perhaps this was referred pain for her. Like when you break a rib, but sometimes it’s your shoulder that hurts when you breathe. Injured in one place but hurt in another.
She’d never really grieved the end of her relationship with Ben. Her attitude had very much been to move on immediately. Perhaps grieving it through someone else was cathartic for her. I couldn’t fault her for it. If I could feel the pain second-hand, I might take that option as well, because right now, I wasn’t sure how I was supposed to survive this.
“What can I do?” Becka’s voice trembled.
“I don’t know how to do this,” I admitted, looking up at the ceiling, blinking furiously. “I don’t know how to… I don’t–” My voice caught and I swallowed. My eyes slid closed, and I allowed two heavy tears to trail down my face, getting to my chin before I brushed them away with my sleeve.
“I don’t know how to go back to how I was before. I don’t know how to be who I was before.”
“Then don’t,” Becka said softly. “Be someone new. Be whoever you want to be.”
“As simple as that?”
“No.”
I waited for her to elaborate, but she didn’t, and we fell silent for several minutes.
Until, eventually, we did the only thing we could, thousands of miles apart, but always together.
“Wanna watchSupernatural?” Her grin was tremulous, but I nodded, and so, we pulled ourselves back together as we watched the world almost end, and be saved in under an hour.
Chapter 26
November 15th
There are stone steps all around the world – at old temples, in small villages older than their own names – worn smooth from millions of footsteps; depressions gradually worn into the implacable stone from the repetition of a million single steps.
I felt a little like those stones. The act of breathing gradually became easier, my chest ached less, and I could take deeper breaths as the days passed. The feeling of the immediate agony was slowly becoming trodden underfoot, becoming a part of the architecture of who I was, and no longer sitting atop me like a boulder, pressing me into the ground. Instead, I was learning how to carry the extra weight.
